the customer knows whether or not there is broadband service available. The problem can be addressed by ordinary business efforts. However, this study and effort is likely to coax governmental resources towards achievement of business goals, which I cannot blame Microsoft for attempting.

@afwriter. That is a good point. Overall, the U.S. is behind most countries in technology including broadband access. It is a shame since we have so many startups and large companies with resources that can address the speed issue but have failed to do so on a wide-scale.

Half of the U.S. has no internet at broadband speed is awful. This issue should have been addressed years ago. Why have it taken so long for companies to even address it. It will take another 5 years for the problem to be resolved.

One can expect commercial operations to brag, hide negative details, and use a bit of "puffery" to say how great they are doing in their public statements and advertising, but when the government uses the same tricks, one wonders what and who can be trusted.

It really seems like the FCC is pulling out every trick and manipulation in the book to make the U.S. Internet situation look better than it is, and even with all of their manipulations it still doesn't look that great.

It's a safe bet the lobbyists and commercial interests don't want to make easily available clarity in the numbers. I wonder too about how the definition of 25/3 might really be defined. My Comcast rural internet is a bit above the 25 download speed but the upload is consistently 2.5. I'm guessing they're getting some fine print allowance that count my slightly lower speed as acceptable under the definitions and goals promoted by the FCC.

I'd be interested to know what data Speedtest(Ookla) has on the availability of broadband across the US. Or even Netflix's view of where broadband speeds are available (or "throttled" or not available at all)....

It would be fascinating to see the FCC release some of the "raw" data that it collects on broadband accessibility by location. I've heard that there's tons of interesting data kept under lock and key because ISPs have lobbied the FCC to maintain commercial secrets. The obscured data of broadband by zip code is probably designed specifically to disallow any interested parties from actually knowing where ISPs have invested.

It's interesting to see Microsoft so involved in getting broadband to rural areas. Usually the press releases are dominated by Google/Facebook for efforts to get broadband to everyone. Google has balloons and Google Fi and Google Fiber (which are confusing names for completely separate projects). And whitespace spectrum hasn't gotten a lot of coverage.
Sounds like Microsoft has been quietly working to beat the newcomer tech giants with a slow and steady strategy. I recently saw a graph of how diverse every tech giant's revenue streams were-- and MSFT was by far the most diversified.

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